On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 06:45:51PM +0100, Gary Gale wrote:
> > I've downloaded the beta 4 Debian-Installer image and I'll give it a try
> > at home tonight ... actually I meant to do this over the weekend but the
> > weather was so good that beer and BBQ's beckoned too strongly; please try
> > to forgive me :-)
> snip ...
> > I'll try the Installer CD tonight and if that fails fall back onto the
> > Woody boot floppies as suggested.
> Hi Helge,
> now I don't want to appear overly pessimistic but this is not looking
> particularly promising. Here's where I've got to after this evening's
> boot attempts.
> I downloaded the Beta 4 of the Debian Installer for Alpha (both the ISO
> and the two boot floppies just to be on the safe side) and the Woody
> floppy images.
Where did you find d-i based boot floppies for Alpha? (Hint: these
don't exist, there has never been a floppy target for alpha in
debian-installer)
> Attempt 1 - Boot the Installer CD from the AlphaBIOS
> No joy; the AlphaBIOS refused to budge on this; insisting that the boot
> configuration was invalid (this was not only during the definition of the
> boot configuration but also when attempting the boot itself).
> On closer examination it appears that the reason behind the boot failure
> is that the milo directory on the CD is empty - no linload.exe, no milo
> ... ?
The sarge installer does not support MILO. No one with a vested
interest in seeing it work has stepped forward to maintain AlphaBIOS
support for sarge.
> Attempt 2 - Boot the Installer Floppies from the AlphaBIOS
> Again - no joy; the AlphaBIOS whinged about an invalid configuration when
> defining the boot config but I'm getting used to that. This time, when I
> selected my new floppy based configuration nothing happened. No activity
> on the floppy drive, no access light flashing, nothing.
> Attempt 3 - Boot the Installer Floppies from the SRM
> You've probably guessed but again, no joy. This time, the transcript
> looked something like this ...
> >>> boot dva0 -flags 0
> (boot dva0.0.0.0.1 -flags 0)
> block 0 of dva0.0.0.0.1 is not a valid boot block
Really, really have no idea what these are.
I'm sorry if I missed this in an earlier message; is there a reason you
didn't try to boot the CD from SRM? Is your CD not recognized as a boot
device with your particular configuration?
If so, your best bet for a direct sarge install (given the lack of MILO
and boot floppy support) might be to use the daily netboot images
available from <http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/d-i/images/daily/>.
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer